BY GIVING HER BONE MARROW TO A STRANGER, AN ILLINOIS MOTHER WENT

Shortly after 5 a.m., Teri Majewski marches purposefully into Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago. Strongly built and fit looking, the 34-year-old mother of two young children seems too healthy to be in a hospital. But she checks in at the day-surgery department and is summoned to an examining room, from which she emerges a few minutes later in a baggy blue hospital gown and the inevitable plastic bracelet. Suddenly, she looks vulnerable. This morning Majewski is scheduled to undergo a bone-marrow harvest, in which doctors will remove about a quart of her marrow to be transplanted into a young patient...